Gamification (Oh crap, that thing i've heard stuff about)

Gamification is a concept that challenges the methods (and i would argue the direction) we teach students in the American Education System.  Gamification refers to a restructuring of the classroom learning system and makes students both more accountable for their own learning, and gives them motivators that would assist them in meeting those educational expectations that we have for them.  Everyone (I Truly Hope) wants their children to succeed at school and move on towards a happy, fulfilling future, and in some ways the way we teach students is not helping them meet that goal.

When we look at how we teach students, we look at a lot of positives and a couple of severe stumbling blocks.  Students are not ready for college (and by college i mean any post high school education program, be it military, vocational training, or a traditional college) and i think that the methods we use to educate are just as much a problem as what we are teaching them.

One of the main problems with education that i see is the rampant over utilization of standardized testing.  School districts have federal grants tied to the outcome of their student's performance on standardized testing.  This causes an astonishing amount of pressure on the school to perform. This means you have administrators pushing teachers, who in turn push students to perform better on these tests.  In some cases, you have teachers who are teaching to the expectations of the test, rather than the curriculum.

This means that the student's needs for learning the approved curricular standards (whether they are common core, or what have you) are not being met because the system has prioritized performance in student scores over student learning.  This means that the students aren't being prepared for the situations that are awaiting them once they've escaped the American education system.

Gamification addresses this in a couple of key ways.  The focus on Gamification is a change in the focus of how student learning is monitored, and the progress that we expect them to make.  Gamification boils down to applying game logic to real world situations and using that metric style to track how and what our students learn.  By crafting the lessons in a gamified method, you can better prepare students to develop the skills and necessities for a successful life?

Now that's a big complicated series of words that doesn't necessarily help you understand what we're talking about, so let me break it down a little more concisely for you. Gamification focuses on a student proving to you (the educator, the parent, the whoever else may be responsible) that they are capable of performing the tasks you expect them to do.  Just like collecting a trick in a game of bridge, or completing a quest in a video game, you (as the learner) have to demonstrate that you have the necessary capabilities to perform that task.

Once a student has shown a specific mastery in a concept, they can move into more complex concepts in the same topic.  Each completed topic increases your depth of knowledge in that area and prepares you to dig deeper into it.  You can't start to do mathematics if you don't understand numbers, for example.  But once you have that basic grasp of numbers, you can start to learn arithmetic, which lays the foundations for geometry and algebra.  You can't move into a topic you aren't prepared for because you are never given the option until you can demonstrate a mastery of the basic concepts.

Gamification looks at education as a means of producing artifacts and work samples that demonstrate that you, the learner, are capable of showing us, the rest of the world, that you are ready to produce work and have the capabilities needed to be successful.  If we don't prepare you for the future, how can we expect you to succeed?